The Brazilian Amazon registers the highest deforestation in the last 15 years

The Amazon Brazilian it lost 13,235 square kilometers of vegetation cover between August 2020 and July 2021, the largest degraded area for a 12-month period in the last 15 years, the government reported.

Logging in the Brazilian part of the largest rainforest in the world in the last year was 21.97% higher than in 2020 (between August 2019 and July 2020), when it covered 10,851 square kilometers, and was not as high from the registered in 2006 (14,286 square kilometers), according to data released by the state National Institute for Space Studies (INPE).

Deforestation increased to an area similar to that of Montenegro and greater than that of countries such as Qatar, Jamaica and Kosovo despite the conservationist discourse that Brazil took this month to the Climate Conference in Glasgow (COP26), where it said it had made progress in the fight against logging in its efforts to reduce polluting gas emissions.

The Brazilian delegation announced in Glasgow that it anticipated from 2030 to 2028 its goal to end illegal deforestation in the Amazon.

According to a statement from the Union of Public Employees in the Science and Technology Area, the leadership of INPE and the Government had known since mid-October the data on the worsening of deforestation, but only authorized its disclosure after the conclusion of COP26 .

The annual logging of the Amazon is measured by the Project for Monitoring the Deforestation of the Legal Amazon by Satellite (Prodes), an INPE tool that uses high-resolution satellite images and allows the identification of devastated areas of at least 6.25 hectares.

According to INPE, among the nine states that make up the so-called Brazilian Legal Amazon, those that contributed the most to deforestation in the last year were Pará, with 39.75% of all measured logging, Amazonas (17.73%) and Mato Grosso (17.10%), which are paradoxically those with the largest preserved extensions.

According to the Climate Observatory, which groups 70 environmental groups including international ones such as Greenpeace and WWF, the new record for deforestation in the Amazon shows “the triumph of the ecocida project” of the Government of President Jair Bolsonaro.

Three records in a row in the Bolsonaro government

Deforestation grew for the third year in a row since the far-right leader Jair Bolsonaro took office in January 2019, and for the first time adds four consecutive years of increase since it began to be measured in 1988.

Ecologists attribute the worsening to Bolsonaro’s anti-environmentalist discourse, which has dismantled environmental enforcement agencies and defended mining and agricultural exploitation projects, including in environmental and indigenous reserves.

“The result is the result of a persistent, planned and continuous effort to destroy environmental protection policies in the Jair Bolsonaro regime. It is the triumph of a cruel project to make the largest rainforest in the world disappear and that turns Bolsonaro into a global climate threat, “said the executive secretary of the Climate Observatory, Marcio Astrini.

Unlike “the propaganda that the Government and its allies in agriculture and industry took to COP26, this is the real Brazil, of scorched earth and organized crime acting without control in the Amazon,” added Astrini, who accused the Government to hide deforestation data to preserve the image of Brazil in Glasgow.

“This is the real Brazil that the Bolsonaro government tries to hide with fanciful speeches and ‘greenwashing’ actions abroad,” said Mauricio Voivodic, executive director of WWF Brazil, referring to a recent statement in which the leader The far right denied that the Amazon suffered fires.

A study presented last week in Glasgow by the Scientific Panel of the Amazon (SPA, for its acronym in English), which brings together some 200 experts from around the world, warned that if the current high rates of deforestation are maintained, the considered The world’s plant lung will reach a point of no return before 2050, which will lead it to lose up to 70% of its native vegetation.